1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of e-business, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for testing an e-business application server to ensure that it can adequately handle overload conditions.
2. Description of the Related Art
The pervasiveness of the Internet has allowed companies to exploit electronic communications to engage in what is commonly known as e-business activities with their customers. E-business involves conducting business on the Internet and not only includes buying and selling goods and services, but can also include servicing customers and collaborating with trading or business partners. To accommodate this vast range of activities, companies strive to ensure that their systems operate optimally by implementing a traffic flow management policy.
A traffic flow management policy is a set of rules which dictate how workload should be handled by a system and corresponding subsystems. A workload is a task or group of tasks that require system resources in order for the system and its corresponding subsystems to process the task or group of tasks. A work request is an electronic request which can be used to request the processing of a workload. Hence, an effective traffic flow management policy should assign and distribute tasks associated with a workload to various processing elements within the system and its subsystems. Moreover, to ensure optimal performance, the traffic flow management policy must constantly monitor system conditions and dynamically adjust resources allocated to process the workload accordingly. Dynamic adjustment can also include redistributing and rescheduling processing of the tasks associated with a workload. Still, it is sometimes necessary to execute multiple application steps in order to simulate a single request. More particularly, this can happen whenever a work request requires the processing of multiple commands. Since the application steps are continuously repeated in multiple application steps, continually recoding the same commands necessary for executing the application steps is not the most efficient methodology for simulating a request. Furthermore, if there is a change to a command sequence that occurs in multiple application steps, then all occurrences of the command must be changed. This could require extensive code modifications which can be time consuming and costly.
Given these drawbacks, what is needed is an efficient method and system for eliminating redundancy among multiple execution sequences during workload simulation.